the meaning of home

Home is not always a place with a door, or walls that remember your height in pencil marks. Sometimes it’s a laugh you recognize in the dark, or a silence that doesn’t ask you to explain yourself. Home is where your name sounds softer, where mistakes are folded away like old letters, kept—not to hurt you, but to prove you’ve lived. It can be a kitchen light left on too late, or a person who knows when you’re tired before you do. It can move. It can change. It can even leave—and come back different. Home is the feeling of setting something down and knowing it will still be there when you return. It’s the quiet yes in your chest that says: *you can stay.*